Out of Pod Experience

... So, I've written a book. Well, no, scratch that -- I've written several now. I've got two full-length YA novels finished and a third that's 90% done. They're part of a series of steampunk-themed fantasy that I've been working on for a little under a year now (being unemployed can drive a person to madness, I suppose. I have a long background in professional publication via journalism, however, so I write fairly fast).

I don't want to toot my own horn, but they're pretty good books... certainly not dreck like Stephenie Meyer's stuff. Yes, my series focuses on a bit of teenage romance and such, but it's not juvenile, pandering, 'oh, Edward left me, I'd better kill myself' or 'it's not even slightly creepy that this sparkly, century-old Vampire thinks that I, a teenage girl, am his destiny' nonsense.

I believe my work could and would sell well -- perhaps not as well as Harry Potter or anything, but it's impossible to tell which way people are going to flock at any given moment (the direction the wind is blowing seems to, as much as anything, determine which series is going to explode into a phenomenon next). All I can say is that they're good enough to compete well against a lot of the stuff I have read over the years, and optimistically that still means something.

Unfortunately, as you might expect, I've had a rotten time getting anyone to so much as glance in their direction. As far as I know, no literary agent has yet read beyond the first several hundred words, and I don't even know that for sure. All I've received is extremely generic 'thanks, but no thanks' rejection letters.

The problem with this business is that there are all these standards and practices that throw up walls between agents and potential authors, I guess as a method of protecting them from the people who truly have no business picking up a pen and pad and having at it. There is no personal communication until the product is basically sold... and you must convince them that you are 'the one' with a letter shorter than what I have typed thus far. Simultaneously, you have to use that same brief correspondence to elevate yourself over a delirious crowd of people screaming for identical attention. It is little wonder, then, that so much really bad stuff heads off to the presses, and so much that is profoundly good spends years wasting away unobserved.

I realize that I haven't been waiting as long as many unpublished authors, but I am getting desperate. Heart disease runs in my family, and while I think I will finish the series before my time, I'm terrified that I'll never see them published. I'm not seeking fame or fortune (but how wonderful indeed if they came), but this work really represents something I want to share with the world. I am a very big closet case with no friends outside my immediate family, and in a strange way, when I work on this series, I don't feel so isolated. The hope against hope that they will one day see the light of day keeps me going.

So, anyway, there you have it. This is an utter shot in the dark. And while I am just one dim twinkle amidst a vast field of sparkling stars, I guess this is my plea to the void that someone will turn their telescope my way.

I absolutely refuse to self-publish. That is the route for people who cannot write, and I can write.

Don't tell me 'it wasn't meant to be.' There are thousands upon thousands of published authors out there who couldn't string three words together successfully without hitting a thesaurus, or falling back on an embarrassingly limited stable of adjectives. You act as if someone rejecting a 200-word query letter constitutes a fair or even sane analysis of my work. I didn't come here seeking a review of my talent, or suggestions on how to limit my own ambitions... just a potential alternate route to success. You can keep your screwed-up outlook to yourself, thanks.

I guess James Joyce couldn't write ? What a silly thing to say. Hard to take you remotely seriously now.

In what genre is your work?

There are some publishing house aout there that are fairly NewBro-friendly. SF/Fantasy, for instance, you could try Baen. Of course, being that they *are* fairly open means that their slushpiles are staggering. You might have to wait a bit before getting read.

Talk to Baen, then. Seriously. They've published two novilizations of Girl Genius.

It is sad reading about his untimely death, though. I am a fervent believer that you cannot be taught to write beyond a certain point -- that there's something that great authors, like painters and musicians and other artists, are just born with. And perhaps he just didn't have 'it.' But, on the other hand, I cannot imagine writing something at the age of 16 and then having its mocked acknowledgement by the larger world annihilate my desire to be an author.

This made me chuckle ... so much ...

Also: When selecting a literary agent, you are selecting, in effect, an employee.
Interview them as such.

Ask for references. CHECK those references. Learn what authors they've represented, what kind of material those authors write, and how many books the agent has placed/sold. Read some of the various athors' work so you can see what quality of writer your agent is in the habit of supporting.

If an agent isn't suitable, well, no harm to anyone, and you've reomved a source of future strife and stress from your world. Move on and interview the next one.

Patience. Seriously. Nothing in publishing moves fast.

OP's post is kind of long winded for someone who says they're a good writer.

The irony here is that most of the true Medieval Romances had nothing at all to do with romantic love stories. We had to read them ALL when I was a sophomore in High School.

There are certainly exceptions like "Tristan and Isolde", but one is hard pressed to find an inkling of even a little smooching in "Percival" or "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". Lancelot and Guinevere sorta owned that in the Arthurian legends indeed.

They had a lot more to do with "heroic prose" than anything else really. And the 'romance' form did get weird in the 1800's with the Gothic Adventures ("The Castle of Otranto" comes to mind - same amazing teacher made us read it. I've only ever seen it referenced, and extensively, in Brian Aldiss' "Trillion Year Spree" history of Science Fiction).

......just tossing this out there......